Helpline
by M1ssUnd3rst4nd1ng
Summary: In which 14-year-old Clara Oswald calls a helpline and gets a little more help than she bargained for. And possibly kidnapped. Third story in the Keeping Up With the Smiths AU (All human, teenager AU); do not need to read the others first.


**Disclaimer: I do not own** ** _Doctor Who_** **, its characters, settings, or events, or about half the dialogue in this story; all rights belong to their respective creators and the BBC.**

 **Cover art by Phoebe594, who is amazing enough to put up with my saying I'm not particular and then being particular anyway.**

 **This story is chronologically the third in the "Keeping Up With the Smiths" AU, a series of interconnected stories set in an alternate universe in which all of the Doctors (up to 12, so far; slight mentions of the existence of 13) are part of a large, slightly crazy family in which they are all named John Smith because of an inside joke (explained in "Meet the Smiths"). There are mentions of another story in the series ("A Few Eggs and a Few Minutes"), but it is summarized within this story; this story can be read completely on its own.**

 **Loosely based on the episode "The Bells of St. John," specifically the beginning, including the borrowing of some dialogue.**

 **Edited 7/29/17 for continuity and some grammar.**

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In Which Clara Oswald Calls a Helpline and Gets a Little More Help Than She Bargained For (and Possibly Kidnapped)

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Clara Oswald didn't know anything about computers really; she could use them for certain functions, as long as someone had shown her how, but beyond that, they were a complete mystery. And she didn't particularly care about knowing any more than that; she much preferred books and the small adventures of everyday life—simple things. Her friends back home had called her "an old soul:" "Positively Victorian," they'd joke, and they weren't exactly wrong. But she couldn't help wishing she knew a little more about them now, because right now she needed the internet and the stupid thing was broken and Angie and Artie were being no help and she just didn't know what to do. Then she remembered the helpline.

She'd been in a shop earlier that day with the kids and had asked one of the girls there if she knew anything about how to fix computers. Unfortunately, she hadn't, but she'd said she knew just the people who could help and had given her the number for a helpline. "Best helpline in the world," she'd said. Then added, "Possibly the whole universe" with a bright laugh and a conspiratorial wink, tongue poking between her teeth as she'd smiled.

Well, Clara didn't know about all that, but she supposed it couldn't hurt to give them a try, so she fished the slip of paper from her pocket, carefully dialed the number, and listened to it ring.

And ring.

And ring.

Finally, someone picked up on the other end with a slightly confused "Hello?" She could hear a bustle of noise and a loud shout of laughter in the background.

"Ah! Hello!" she responded. _Finally,_ she thought, _let's make this quick._ "I can't find the internet."

"Sorry?" Definite confusion now, so she clarified.

"It's gone. The internet. Can't find it anywhere. Where is it?"

"The internet?" Apparently, her clarification hadn't actually made anything clearer on the other end.

But she wasn't sure how she could make it any clearer than that. "Yes. The internet." That should be simple enough, right? Especially for a helpline? "Why don't I have the internet?" A nice summation of the problem. Perfectly clear.

It suddenly occurred to her that perhaps there was a language barrier; people were always complaining about helplines being in different countries. "Am I phoning a different country?"

He laughed. "Maybe you are. A different world, even."

That sounded a bit joking, but this was a very serious matter. They needed to be practical about this. "Will it show up on the bill?"

"Oh, I dread to think." He was definitely joking now. Possibly flirting. At least, she hoped. That he was joking about the bill, that is; not that he was flirting. "Listen," he continued, unaware of her distraction, "where did you get this number?"

"The girl in the shop wrote it down." Now she was confused; this was sounding less and less like a helpline and more like she was being used to pull a practical joke on somebody. "It's a helpline, isn't it? She said it's the best helpline out there. In the universe, she said."

"What girl? Who was she?"

"Hmm, I don't know. The girl in the shop." Did it matter where she got the number from? Was this some sort of survey? Well, if it was she didn't have time for it and she certainly wasn't going to answer any more stupid questions until she'd got the help she'd called for. "So why isn't there internet?" she demanded. "Shouldn't it just sort of be there?"

"Look, I'm not actually—this isn't—" he stammered. Then he sighed. "You have clicked on the Wi-Fi button, haven't you?"

 _The what?_

"Hang on," she muttered, as much to herself as to him as she started looking. "Wi . . . Fi . . ."

She heard a voice on the other end and his muffled response, "It's a girl."

"Thank you for noticing," she snorted sarcastically.

There was a pause on the other end while she continued to search for the Wi-Fi, then he asked, "What did you say?" and rushed to his next question without waiting for a reply: "What's your address?" She was about to tell him how creepy he sounded and hang up when he seemed to realize it for himself and clarified, "I'll come over and help you find the internet."

She was still suspicious, though, especially with how excited he sounded at the prospect. "You can't do it over the phone?"

"No, no, absolutely not. Has to be done in person. It is essential that I come to your house."

He still sounded a little overly-excited, but the girl in the shop had seemed nice in an unlikely-to-send-you-to-a-creep kind of way. And also, the conversation had been odd from the start, so perhaps he was just a strange sort in general, but not necessarily a bad sort of strange. And as strange as he seemed, maybe he didn't have any friends and was just excited by the idea of human contact that wasn't over a phone. There, that was reasonable enough, so she gave him her address.

Just a few minutes later, she heard the doorbell ring, followed by obnoxious knocking that didn't stop until she answered the door. The boy on the other side was a teenager like her, maybe a year or so older, and tall in a gangly, awkward sort of way, with a great, gaping grin that split his face the moment he saw her. She knew right off that this was the boy from the helpline, though she wasn't entirely sure how. He looked as excited to be there as she had expected, and a bit familiar.

"Do you remember me?" he burst out.

So perhaps he was familiar somehow, but . . . "No. Should I? Who are you?"

"Ah, sorry, John Smith," he introduced himself. She still had no idea where she was supposed to recognize him from. "No?" he pressed hopefully, "John Smith?"

She had no idea still and was beginning to get a bit irritated with his insistence on it, so the more sarcastic side of her nature came out. "John Smith? Seriously?"

But he took it with good humor. "No, just John Smith." He grinned manically again. "John Smith Seriously would be a terrible name for me; I'm never knowingly serious."

"How'd you get here so fast?" she demanded, "I thought I was calling a different country."

"I believe I actually said that you were maybe calling a different world, which, metaphorically speaking, maybe you were. But as it happens, my world is just a few minutes away from your world, so here I am."

She regarded him carefully. Possibly insane, yes; very strange, definitely; but he seemed nice enough, and a bit fun besides. Plus, there was a chance he could help her get to the internet and she was about at her wit's end with that and didn't have the time to keep messing with it.

She offered him her hand. "Clara Oswald."

He took it. "John Smith. Here to help."

He did find the internet, which proved to be ridiculously easy and she suspected he hadn't really needed to come after all; though of course, she hadn't been able to find it herself, despite how easy it turned out to be, so perhaps he had. But then he refused to leave. He said that she had called a helpline and he was here to help, then he'd brought her a drink and some biscuits for while she was surfing the internet (though he'd helped himself to them and returned a half-eaten one to the top of the pile), asked her a bit about herself before he realized she needed quiet, dusted her bookshelf and paged through her adventure book, and eventually wandered off. She'd thought he'd gone back to whatever ridiculous place he'd sprung from until she left for the library that evening.

He had gotten a lawn chair and a small folding table from somewhere and was reading a book and enjoying a cup of tea on the front lawn, a haphazardly parked, very old, very blue car behind him with the passenger door open and the stereo playing soft music, and he looked up as soon as she came out.

"Hello!" he exclaimed, standing and dropping his book on the table next to his precariously balanced tea cup, which rattled ominously when it landed. He looked a bit like a puppy whose owner had just arrived home, she mused, with his brown hair flopping over one eye like a puppy's ears and that mad scramble of limbs that signified he hadn't grown into them quite yet.

"Have you been here all afternoon?" she queried.

"Ah, yes. I've been helping!" he said, as if it were the most exciting thing he'd ever done.

"With what?"

"I fixed that rattling noise in the washing machine, weeded and optimized the photosynthesis in the main flower bed, and I assembled the bicycle in the garage. It doesn't exactly look like a regular bicycle—didn't have all the parts; had to improvise—still, it should almost definitely be safe. Probably. I like your house." He didn't seem to draw breath from start to end.

"Isn't mine." she corrected. "I'm a friend of the family. Just staying for a bit."

He nodded, "You look after the kids."

It didn't seem like a guess, and she wasn't entirely sure how he knew that. "I'm the babysitter, yeah," she confirmed, squinting.

He nodded again. "Are you going somewhere?"

She squinted further. "Yes."

He swooped to the open passenger car of the door and gestured inside. "Hop in."

She took a step back and tightened her arms around herself. "I'm sorry?"

"It's going to rain any minute," he declared with a vague gesture at the sky, which was in fact gathering very dark clouds very quickly, "I can't let you walk alone in the rain; it would be ungentlemanly." She still hesitated and he glanced back up at the sky, just as the first drops started sounding against the ground and the hood of his car. He pointed as he said, with a mad grin, "You, me, car-" he looked up at the sky- "now."

Well, she didn't particularly want to walk all the way to the library lugging her book bag in the rain, and he had shown a penchant for being genuinely helpful, even if he was odd about it.

And she'd always wanted to go on adventures.

She got in the car.

With great speed and an enormous amount of banging and muttering to himself, he bundled his things into the back seat, then clambered in after them and across the barrier into the front seat, shaking the rain from his hair like the puppy she'd compared him to earlier. She told him she was headed to the library to study, and they were off with a lurch and a wheeze.

He drove like a madman, this boy: all sharp turns and sudden stops, hands flitting between the stereo, the wiper controls, the heating controls and vents, the mirror, and the wheel itself, and fingers dancing around its circumference; still, the actual motion of the vehicle itself was steady enough, so the movements of the driver were more amusing than anything.

The car was strange, too, even stranger on the inside than she had thought from outside. It fit him somehow. The most noticeable thing about it was a circular glass case installed under the radio and jutting out into the space between the front seats about two or three inches, a little over a foot in height, with something brightly lit inside that moved up and down with a slight wheeze and buttons and switches all over the top and crawling up the dashboard, a giant lever above the radio, which he'd had to flip from the passenger side to the driver's side before they could begin driving. The seats themselves, both in the front and in the back, did not match each other and appeared to have been scrounged from elsewhere; the rear seat barely fit between the back doors. The dashboard was completely custom, made from wood with wires showing through in some places and the part of it that was right in front of her seat had things carved or burnt into it, odd little sayings like "You were fantastic. And you know what? So was I" and "I don't want to go."

She studied the driver again and decided that he wasn't unpleasant to look at, if a bit unconventional, despite that enormous chin.

And with the observation of that chin, she suddenly remembered where she'd seen him before: there'd been a baking competition at the fair when she'd first moved to town and she'd got distracted and hadn't realized she'd forgotten both the milk and eggs for her soufflé until the absolute last moment and he'd been kind enough to fetch them for her, after he'd run into her and knocked her over, of course; she'd called him "Chin Boy" for lack of a proper introduction. And she'd flirted, if she remembered correctly. Possibly quite outrageously. With him and his friend both.

Her study of him and his car and her reminiscing distracted her from the drive, so she didn't notice until the car had stopped—with another wheeze and a groan and the thump of that lever on top of the dash—that they were not headed the way she'd normally go to the library. They stopped in front of an enormous, brightly lit house with quite a few people visible through one window and a handful of cars in a rather large driveway; by the light of the lamp above the door and the slightly more distant street lamps, she could see that the house was painted a similar shade of blue to the car they were in and she just knew it was his.

"Where are we?" she demanded. "What are we doing here?"

He looked a little surprised. "You seem upset."

"I don't know where I am!"

"Ah," he realized, "I see. That's easy enough. This is my house."

"Your house." She might have been angrier if she weren't somehow both surprised and not surprised at all simultaneously; the whole effect was somehow tiring enough that she couldn't work up any real ire at the situation and her voice came out rather flat. "And what are we doing here?"

He grinned, a quietly mischievous sort of grin unlike the eager puppy grins he'd been displaying all day, and patted the dash of his car affectionately. "The old girl may not always take you where you want to go, but she always takes you where you need to go; it's in the manual. You said you needed to study and you can do that better here than at the library: here there's always someone around to help. Would you like to stay for dinner?"

She contemplated it. She really did. She didn't really know this boy—who had possibly kidnapped her?—and a house full of strangers didn't seem like it would be as good a place to study as a nice quiet library, nor was it likely to have any reference materials she might need, but on the other hand, everything about this boy promised the adventures she'd always craved and he had shown himself to be quite kind besides.

But he was smiling like he knew she would say yes, and that annoyed her. "Does this work?"

"Eh?"

She laughed. "Is this actually what you do? You just crook your fingers and girls come home to dinner?"

He slumped a bit, moping, as he sensed a rejection coming, and flipped the lever back again.

As they silently drove to the library, she thought of his earlier excitement. She thought of the adventure all of this promised. She thought of his big, friendly smile and that house full of people and lights and how lonely she'd been since she'd lost her parents and moved to a place where she didn't belong. So as she stepped out at her proper destination, she leaned back into the car. "Come back tomorrow. Ask me again."

She saw his eyes light up with hope as she closed the door and started to walk away, and she heard his car door opening behind her. "Why?"

She turned and looked at him over her shoulder with a flirty smile. "Because tomorrow I might say yes."

As she turned again to enter the building, she heard him muttering to himself. "Clara Oswald, you impossible girl."

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 **Some readers may recognize "the girl in the shop." It's not who it ended up being in canon (this was written significantly before Missy appeared and this version fits better within this AU).**

 **Have a lovely day!**

 **M1ssUnd3rst4nd1ng**


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